When Julie Seltzer puts her quill to paper, she must follow strict
procedures. Her quill must be a hand-sharpened feather and dipped in a
special soot-based ink that never fades. She must write on parchment
made from the skin of a kosher animal, and if she makes a single
mistake, she must begin all over again. She must speak every word aloud
before she writes it down. And before she writes the first word, she
must state, "I am writing these words for the sake of the sanctity of
the Name."

Seltzer painstakingly etches Hebrew letters onto a Torah scroll.

Seltzer is a Torah scribe. She is thought to be one of only
ten female scribes in the world. For thousands of years, Jews have
followed strict and elaborate rules for transcribing the five books of
Moses onto parchment scrolls. But none of these ancient laws says
anything about a scribe's gender. The term in Hebrew for a woman scribe
is soferet, a feminized version of sofer, the word for male scribe. "My
love for the Hebrew letters is not a logical love, but an instinctual
love," Seltzer, who lives in San Francisco, says. "I'm drawn to [the
letters] from my depths, not my head. The scribal process provides
access to an intimate relationship with the Torah in its most elemental
state—the building blocks of the letters."

Seltzer grew up in Yardley, Pennsylvania, without much religious
observance. Instead of going straight to college, she spent a semester
at a kibbutz in Israel. It was here that she fell in love with Hebrew.
"There was something about the sound of Hebrew that was so deeply
familiar to me, in a very primal way," Seltzer explains. "Strangely,
Hebrew felt like my mother tongue." She continued to study Hebrew at
Brown, even as she concentrated in theater arts.

Seltzer moved back and forth between Israel and the United States
after graduating, continuing her Judaic studies and working as a
teacher at a Jewish day school and a baker at the Isabella Freedman
Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut.

One day Seltzer found herself creating an art piece using stencils of
the Hebrew letters and, as she arranged the letters, she had an
epiphany. "It hit me, seemingly out of the blue, that I really wanted
to learn how to write letters the same way they are written in the
Torah," she says. The Torah has its own special script, developed by
scribes over thousands of years.

In January 2008, Seltzer began learning the laws of sofrut, the scribal
arts. She worked on a Torah restoration project, participated in a
communal women's Torah project, and wrote out the Song of Songs as part
of her training. Nearly a year later, she got her first solo project—
sitting at a small desk in the main gallery of San Francisco's
Contemporary Jewish Museum and writing a Torah. The museum called the
live exhibition of a Torah scribe "As It Is Written: Project 304,805."
The number refers to the number of letters in the Torah. During her
twelve months on display, Seltzer wrote for five hours a day,
five-and-a-half days a week, taking periodic breaks to give lectures
and answer questions about scribing.

Seltzer expects to finish the project by January. The completed Torah
will belong to the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and be lent out
regularly to Bay Area congregations in need of a Torah. "There is a
mystical idea that the world was created not just through speech, but
through the letters themselves," Seltzer says. "One Jewish tradition
describes wisdom as the ability to properly combine these
letters—divine Boggle, you might say."

Alessandra Wollner '10 is a freelance writer living in Berkeley, California. Learn more about Seltzer's museum exhibit at www.thecjm.org.

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